Morgan's Corner: GOP goal is suppressing the black vote

View full sizeAP photoSen. John McCain introduces Mia Love during a rally at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center on Aug. 16, 2012. Love has been given a coveted speaking slot at the Republican National Convention, organizers announced yesterday. Love, a darling of tea-party and conservative Republicans, is characterized by her groundbreaking role in state politics. Utah's first black female mayor, she stands to become the first black Republican woman to take office in Congress if she topples Jim Matheson, a Democrat, in the November election. Political analysts say it could be the toughest race for Matheson, a popular incumbent in his own right who has handily beat other Republican challengers for a dozen years. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, Love will get her moment in the national spotlight among the first of Republican speakers on Tuesday evening, convention CEO William Harris announced.

The state by state campaigns to pass voter ID laws is fast becoming a national shame. Doubly so, since it's an effort championed by the Republican Party, which fashions itself as the party of Lincoln, the party that went to war to rid the country of slavery.

But here we are, 147 years after the Civil War and 47 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, locked in a battle harkening back to the days of poll taxes and literacy tests.

The current voter ID laws, as they are being promulgated, will largely impact African-Americans, seniors and students who don't have the identification required by these new laws. It was the party of Lincoln that after the Civil War amended the Constitution to guarantee full rights of citizenship to newly freed slaves, including voting rights. Eventually federal troops stationed in former Confederate states were withdrawn, paving the way for the vanquished Confederate whites to impose Jim Crow laws on their former slaves, effectively re-establishing a dominance over them that, much to the shame of the nation, lasted in one form or another for nearly another 100 years.

Many things have changed since then. Blacks, once loyal to the party of Lincoln are now, by and large, loyal Democrats and the once solid Democratic South has morphed into a Republican Party bastion that includes the far right fringe known as the Tea Party.

In states, on all points of the compass, where Republicans wield a majority, voter ID laws are being enacted. New Jersey, with its Republican governor, Chris Christie, but Democratically controlled Legislature, has been late to this game. However, Ocean County Sen. Chris Connors, working with GOP Assembly members Diane Gove and Brian Rumpf, are fostering Bill S200 that if passed will require voters to produce a state-issued ID to vote. Democratic members of the Legislature are confident the bill is doomed to defeat.

Jersey City had its own brush with voter ID requirements in 1995, when during the nonpartisan mayoral election former Mayor Gerald McCann off-duty cops substituted for poll workers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods and challenged voters to produce ID before being permitted to cast their ballot. That was not a state-sanctioned action. It was solely a strategy of the McCann camp, albeit an unsuccessful one. He lost to challenger Anthony R. Cucci.

McCann, a Democrat, eventually apologized, but that election left a bad taste in the mouths and sensibilities of minority voters, who are casting a weary and knowing eye on these latest Republican maneuvers.

In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and many other states, blacks and white are marching, pressing court challenges and generally raising hell at GOP efforts to block millions of people from the polls.

In Pennsylvania, a Republican state legislator openly boasted that the voter ID law passed there assures a Mitt Romney victory.

Florida's GOP governor and Legislature even rigged voter registration laws to prevent community organization from conducting traditional registration drives without risking fines and even jail time.

The GOP in Ohio has twisted itself into a pretzel in its attempt to craft restrictive voter ID laws and curtail past early voting practices that allowed early balloting in the evening and on weekends. Things have become so manic there that the state's secretary of state is threatening to suspend two voting officials in predominantly Democratic counties for attempting to continue weekend voting.

If this is what the Republican Party is willing to do to win an election will it be able to govern with this great shame besmirching its victory?